Finally arrived in Orlando after a long flight from Cape Town via Dubai. We are staying at the Fort Wilderness resort within Disney World. The whole family has come along with, so this is definitely going to be an amazing week of family fun and Xamarin!

Fort Wilderness is amazing. We are staying in log Cabins within a forest, a natural feel to it, but close enough to be in

the parks in a few minutes using the internal transit system. I am not too sure though what peak traffic is like Orlando to the Xamarin conference at the Hyatt Regency, but will leave early just incase.

Forte Wilderness Disney World

Started the day with a trip to the Hollywood and then the Magic Kingdom. Plenty of magic and also Star Wars which makes the whole family very happy.

With Microsoft Build 2016 complete, there are so many things to be looking at and trying out. One of the more useful features for me right now is the new remoting functionality in Windows 10 IoT Insider Preview 10.0.14295. I have this running on a Raspberry Pi 3 and I am busy with some work using an array of sensor telemetry. Being able to see what is happening remotely make life far easier when building Universal Apps.

To configure this is very simple. There is a new menu option added to the administration console called “Remote”. This is accessible via the URL: http://[ipaddress of pi]:8080. If you haven’t changed the password the login should be: “Administrator” and “[email protected]”

This will run on any Windows 10 device. Just something to note: on a Windows 10 Mobile device (Lumia 950 XL in my case) you may have to set the device color scheme to light for the application text to be legible. I’m sure this will be corrected in later builds.

Fill in the IP address of the Raspberry PI in the “Enter an IP address” text box and click / tap “Connect”. You should now be seeing what the Raspberry Pi is displaying.

Day 1 of Build 2015 has been great! The IoT inclusions especially have been very exciting for me.

We now have Windows 10 IoT core released and running on:

Raspberry Pi 2
MinnowBoard Max
Galileo

Also very interesting and exciting news is, we have Arduino support from Microsoft.

Windows Remote Arduino
Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino

Let’s start by installing Windows 10 IoT Core Preview on a Raspberry PI 2. I know many of you that bought a PI just to do this, I know I did. 🙂

Start by downloading the “Windows_IoT_Core_RPI2_BUILD” from “https://connect.microsoft.com/windowsembeddedIoT/Downloads“. I had to accept some EULAs and click around before anything appeared to be selected for download. It could have also been a timing problem as I was a bit eager to download and perhaps it was not available that soon.

After a short wait, you should see: “Operation completed successfully”. Eject the SD card.

Insert the SD card into the SD card slot in the Raspberry PI 2. Plug the HDMI cable into the PI and of course the monitor. Plug the power cable into the Raspberry PI. After a few worrying minutes Windows 10 IoT should be all booted up. It will reboot once during the initial setup process and the interesting blocks displayed in-between the Windows Logo appearing and final boot-up seems normal.

Microsoft is doing a lot of great things at the moment. One of these is the ability to run ASP .NET vNext away from a Windows Server, and away from IIS. Being a ASP .NET Mvc developer for a few years now, the idea to run on any environment is quite liberating.

A pcDuino is a device with tons of potential. It’s a powerful device and it really is a full “mini PC” with enough processing power to do interesting things like image processing. But is small enough to be used in situations where you would uses an Arduino, Netduino, RFduino etc in the IoT or maker space. The pcDuino also has an Ethernet port and on-board WiFi, so it is a rather compelling internet connected device.

Having deployed Mono on my board already, it was also a no brainer to extend that and to explore the potential of an internet connected device but leveraging ASP .NET vNext to do that.

Now we need something to run. Lets use one of the samples from the ASP .NET github repository.for simplicity. Clone the aspnet repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/aspnet/Home

Focusing on the Mvc example, change to the directory “HelloMvc”. To resolve and download the necessary dependencies for the project, execute a restore command on the package manager “KPM”.

$ cd Home/samples/HelloMvc
$ kpm restore

We need to set up a symbolic link for libuv to avoid any “Object Reference not set to an instance of an object” errors. This is not the most helpful or informative of error messages, but we get what it means.

Being a C# .NET developer and a Xamarin developer, it was just a matter of time before I had to have Mono on my pcDuino. A default package installation of Mono on any ARM (ARMhf) device (like the pcDuino with it’s A20 processor) at this moment is unfortunately not possible as it’s not available yet. However luckily Mono can be compiled directly on the pcDuino. I’ll share my exploration of building Mono 3.12.0 here.

Attempting to install the current Mono packages on a system with an ARMhf processor will currently yield the following unfriendly error messages:

sudo apt-get install mono-devel
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mono-devel : Depends: mono-runtime (>= 2.10.1) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-cecil-private-cil (>= 3.12.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-cecil-private-cil (< 3.12.1) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-codecontracts4.0-cil (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-compilerservices-symbolwriter4.0-cil (>= 3.6.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-corlib2.0-cil (>= 3.2.8) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-corlib4.5-cil (>= 3.12.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-peapi2.0a-cil (>= 3.2.8) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-peapi4.0a-cil (>= 3.2.8) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-relaxng4.0-cil (>= 2.10.1) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-security2.0-cil (>= 3.0.6) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-security4.0-cil (>= 3.0.6) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-componentmodel-composition4.0-cil (>= 3.0.6) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-componentmodel-dataannotations4.0-cil (>= 3.2.3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-configuration-install4.0-cil (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-configuration4.0-cil (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-core4.0-cil (>= 3.2.8) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-data-linq4.0-cil (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-data2.0-cil (>= 3.12.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-data4.0-cil (>= 3.12.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-numerics4.0-cil (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-runtime-serialization4.0-cil (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-runtime4.0-cil (>= 2.10.1) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-security4.0-cil (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-servicemodel4.0a-cil (>= 3.2.3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-web-services4.0-cil (>= 1.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-web2.0-cil (>= 2.10.3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-xml-linq4.0-cil (>= 3.0.6) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system-xml4.0-cil (>= 3.12.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system2.0-cil (>= 3.12.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-system4.0-cil (>= 3.12.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono2.0-cil (>= 3.6.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: mono-mcs (= 3.12.0-0xamarin3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: mono-gac (= 3.12.0-0xamarin3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: mono-xbuild (= 3.12.0-0xamarin3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-cil-dev (= 3.12.0-0xamarin3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libmono-2.0-dev (>= 3.12.0-0xamarin3) but 3.2.8+dfsg-4ubuntu1 is to be installed
Recommends: mono-csharp-shell but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

To solve this problem we will make our own ARMhf targeted build. Let’s start by finding a USB memory stick or a SD card with sufficient space. The Mono source repository is quite large and it occupies about two gigabytes of storage. I would suggest a size of four gigabytes or more (I used an eight gigabyte module myself). Make sure it’s formatted to the Ext file system. FAT32 will not work for compilation. I wasted a good couple of hours with error messages caused simply by the chaos caused using the wrong file system.

This is a brief introduction to the pcDuino. I personally love it. It’s a very compact, high performance device but with compatibility with arduino shields. This is great for IOT use cases where more performance (or you could say intelligence) is needed. The applications for this is endless and I hope to be exploring many of those in blogs to come.

Today I will just start with getting to know the pcDuino, and will take baby steps and we will begin with installing Ubuntu on it. Out of interest, the pcDuino can also run Android 4.2.

As the picture shows, the pcDuino is nice and compact, but has all the features you could want on a device. Having said that, there is only 1 Type A USB port. I suggest as per my photo, to use a USB hub at-least to get everything up and running. Many thanks to ‘O’Reilley’ for mine! 🙂 I am using a USB thumb drive, but to save a port a micro SD card could also be used. There is a SD card slot under the board next to the audio connector.

Overview (as per www.pcduino.com)

pcDuino3 is a high performance, cost effective single board computer. It runs operation systems such as Ubuntu Linux and Android. pcDuino3 has HDMI interface to output its graphic desktop screen. It could support multi-format 1080p 60fps video decoder and 1080p 30fps H.264 and MPEG4 video encoder with its built-in hardware video processing engine. It targets specially the fast growing demands from the open source community. pcDuino3 provides easy-to-use tool chains and is compatible with the popular Arduino ecosystem such as Arduino Shields.

Download Phoenix Suite for writing the Nand Image to the pcDuino from here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/pcduino/Tools/PhoenixSuit1.0.6.zip

I didn’t have much luck getting Phoenix Suite to work in Windows 8.1 64 bit. The USB driver does not install. I however had success on Windows XP and Windows 7.

You will need two micro USB cables for writing the nand image. You will also need a 5V 2A USB power supply. I am using an iPad charger which is working just fine.

Plug in the USB power supply into the power USB port. This is situated between the Ethernet port and the HDMI port. Then plug in the second USB cable into the micro USB OTG port, which is situated next to the USB type A port on the opposite side of the board. The other end of this cable will be plugged into the PC.

Run the Phoenix Suite software. It will oddly say, “No Device Attached”, but ignore that. Select “Firmware” which is top center of the dialog. And browse to the image. Note that this uses the “img” file, so be sure to extract the “gz” file that was downloaded. I used 7zip to do this. Click on the “Upgrade” button. Again ignore any messages that pop up.

On the pcDuino board press the “Upgrade” button. While holding the button, press the “Reset” button. These are both clearly marked on the board.

A few minutes later you should be greeted with a message: “Upgrade Firmware Succeeded!” Plug in a HDMI cable, mouse, keyboard and reset the pcDuino. A moment later Ubuntu should boot and the GUI will appear on the HDMI monitor. Also note the Tx and Rx leds on the board will both be lit up indicating success.

This is just the first step to exploring the pcDuino. I hope it was helpful.

In certain situations the emulators provided just don’t cut it. It is actually relatively simply to create your own by just using an x86 image of Android. It is also possible to add additional features to the emulator for testing by virtue of daemons installed.

For Windows 8
 Win Key – C
 Settings
 Power
 Hold Shift and Restart
 Wait for Boot Screen
 Choose Other Operating System
 Disable Hyper-V (Remember to do this every time you want to use Virtual Box or
VMWare instead of HyperV)

Install Virtual Box or VM Ware

For VMWare:
 Install VMWare Workstation 10 (the free VMWare Player will work aswell to
playback VMs)
 Install Hackintosh Template for